I have been working on a new project which has me a bit excited. Its fairly basic but has a great deal of potential to be a nice A/V piece. Here are a couple videos.

Video 1
Video 2

The thinking behind this piece is fairly straightforward. Make a node, send out a bunch of arcs from that node but label one as being ’special’. The non-special arcs will simply end when they reach the ground again, but the ’special’ one will continue the process and make a bunch of new arcs ad infinitum.

To keep things from getting bogged down over time, each node has a lifespan. Once the age reaches the lifespan, the corresponding arcs will retract and eliminate themselves.

There is also a fairly robust dynamic camera system which follows the ’special’ path. It has a nice random but controlled appearance which was actually a happy mistake. The camera maintains a distance from the tip of the special arcs as they grow and this distance is represented by a sine wave. It also rotates a bit by determining the angle in which the ’special’ arc is growing and moving around that angle in another sine wave.

Here is another video of a simple particle system that I tried to implement but it ended up detracting from the simplicity of the original version so I made this video showing just the particles and no arcs.

Video 3

Also worthy of note is the presence of antialiasing which Processing on a Mac was having a hard time of dealing with. A friend did a quick recompile of Processing with the necessary changes to make it use hardware level antialiasing. Here is a before image:

… and an after image:

Hooray nerds!